Unlock Peak Performance and Efficiency: The Power of OpenStack Watcher

118 days ago • 11 views • Superuser • superuser.openinfra.org

Watcher empowers cloud administrators with Day 2 capabilities to intelligently manage workloads and optimize infrastructure. It has been an official OpenStack project for some time, but has been updated and expanded recently, adding Prometheus as a data source and enhancing its integration with other OpenStack services.

What is OpenStack Watcher?

At its core, Watcher is an OpenStack service that helps you analyze your cloud’s resource usage and identify opportunities for improvement. It operates through a robust architecture as shown below:

Key Capabilities

  • Collecting Metrics: Watcher utilizes various data sources for metric collection. In Openstack environments, it leverages Prometheus datastores, allowing it to gather real-time and historical performance data, such as CPU utilization, memory consumption, and I/O rates of virtual machines and compute nodes. This integration with Prometheus enables Watcher to use gnocchi and ceilometer data from a common backend.
  • Analyzing and Proposing Actions: Based on administrator-defined goals and strategies, Watcher analyzes the collected metrics. Watcher’s audit component triggers strategy execution. Strategies are algorithms